Sam Watson’s journal round-up for 16th April 2018

Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.

Studies looking at the relationship between health care expenditure and patient outcomes have exploded in popularity. A recent systematic review identified 65 studies by 2014 on the topic – and recent experience from these journal round-ups suggests this number has increased significantly since then. The relationship between national spending and health outcomes is important to inform policy and health care budgets, not least through the specification of a cost-effectiveness threshold. Karl Claxton and colleagues released a big study looking at all the programmes of care in the NHS in 2015 purporting to estimate exactly this. I wrote at the time that: (i) these estimates are only truly an opportunity cost if the health service is allocatively efficient, which it isn’t; and (ii) their statistical identification method, in which they used a range of socio-economic variables as instruments for expenditure, was flawed as the instruments were neither strong determinants of expenditure nor (conditionally) independent of population health. I also noted that their tests would be unlikely to be any good to detect this problem. In response to the first, Tony O’Hagan commented to say that that they did not assume NHS efficiency, nor even that it was assumed that the NHS is trying to maximise health. This may well have been the case, but I would still, perhaps pedantically, argue then that this is therefore not an opportunity cost. For the question of instrumental variables, an alternative method was proposed by Martyn Andrews and co-authors, using information that feeds into the budget allocation formula as instruments for expenditure. In this new article, Claxton, Lomas, and Martin adopt Andrews’s approach and apply it across four key programs of care in the NHS to try to derive cost-per-QALY thresholds. First off, many of my original criticisms I would also apply to this paper, to which I’d also add one: (Statistical significance being used inappropriately complaint alert!!!) The authors use what seems to be some form of stepwise regression by including and excluding regressors on the basis of statistical significance – this is a big no-no and just introduces large biases (see this article for a list of reasons why). Beyond that, the instruments issue – I think – is still a problem, as it’s hard to justify, for example, an input price index (which translates to larger budgets) as an instrument here. It is certainly correlated with higher expenditure – inputs are more expensive in higher price areas after all – but this instrument won’t be correlated with greater inputs for this same reason. Thus, it’s the ‘wrong kind’ of correlation for this study. Needless to say, perhaps I am letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Is this evidence strong enough to warrant a change in a cost-effectiveness threshold? My inclination would be that it is not, but that is not to deny it’s relevance to the debate.

“Moderate drinkers live longer” is the adage of the casual drinker as if to justify a hedonistic pursuit as purely pragmatic. But where does this idea come from? Studies that have compared risk of cardiovascular disease to level of alcohol consumption have shown that disease risk is lower in those that drink moderately compared to those that don’t drink. But correlation does not imply causation – non-drinkers might differ from those that drink. They may be abstinent after experiencing health issues related to alcohol, or be otherwise advised to not drink to protect their health. If we truly believed moderate alcohol consumption was better for your health than no alcohol consumption we’d advise people who don’t drink to drink. Moreover, if this relationship were true then there would be an ‘optimal’ level of consumption where any protective effect were maximised before being outweighed by the adverse effects. This new study pools data from three large consortia each containing data from multiple studies or centres on individual alcohol consumption, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and all-cause mortality to look at these outcomes among drinkers, excluding non-drinkers for the aforementioned reasons. Reading the methods section, it’s not wholly clear, if replicability were the standard, what was done. I believe that for each different database a hazard ratio or odds ratio for the risk of CVD or mortality for eight groups of alcohol consumption was estimated, these ratios were then subsequently pooled in a random-effects meta-analysis. However, it’s not clear to me why you would need to do this in two steps when you could just estimate a hierarchical model that achieves the same thing while also propagating any uncertainty through all the levels. Anyway, a polynomial was then fitted through the pooled ratios – again, why not just do this in the main stage and estimate some kind of hierarchical semi-parametric model instead of a three-stage model to get the curve of interest? I don’t know. The key finding is that risk generally increases above around 100g/week alcohol (around 5-6 UK glasses of wine per week), below which it is fairly flat (although whether it is different to non-drinkers we don’t know). However, the picture the article paints is complicated, risk of stroke and heart failure go up with increased alcohol consumption, but myocardial infarction goes down. This would suggest some kind of competing risk: the mechanism by which alcohol works increases your overall risk of CVD and your proportional risk of non-myocardial infarction CVD given CVD.

I’m not sure I will write out the full blurb again about studies of in utero exposure to difficult or stressful conditions and later life outcomes. There are a lot of them and they continue to make the top journals. Admittedly, I continue to cover them in these round-ups – so much so that we could write a literature review on the topic on the basis of the content of this blog. Needless to say, exposure in the womb to stressors likely increases the risk of low birth weight birth, neonatal and childhood disease, poor educational outcomes, and worse labour market outcomes. So what does this new study (and the comments) contribute? Firstly, it uses a new type of stressor – maternal stress caused by a death in the family and apparently this has a dose-response as stronger ties to the deceased are more stressful, and secondly, it looks at mental health outcomes of the child, which are less common in these sorts of studies. The identification strategy compares the effect of the death on infants who are in the womb to those infants who experience it shortly after birth. Herein lies the interesting discussion raised in the above linked comment and reply papers: in this paper the sample contains all births up to one year post birth and to be in the ‘treatment’ group the death had to have occurred between conception and the expected date of birth, so those babies born preterm were less likely to end up in the control group than those born after the expected date. This spurious correlation could potentially lead to bias. In the authors’ reply, they re-estimate their models by redefining the control group on the basis of expected date of birth rather than actual. They find that their estimates for the effect of their stressor on physical outcomes, like low birth weight, are much smaller in magnitude, and I’m not sure they’re clinically significant. For mental health outcomes, again the estimates are qualitatively small in magnitude, but remain similar to the original paper but this choice phrase pops up (Statistical significance being used inappropriately complaint alert!!!): “We cannot reject the null hypothesis that the mental health coefficients presented in panel C of Table 3 are statistically the same as the corresponding coefficients in our original paper.” Statistically the same! I can see they’re different! Anyway, given all the other evidence on the topic I don’t need to explain the results in detail – the methods discussion is far more interesting.